


playing revisionist historian

by corleones



Category: The Hour
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-26
Updated: 2011-12-26
Packaged: 2017-10-28 04:21:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/303678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corleones/pseuds/corleones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is his distance from the everyone else he works with - their hypotheses are about far flung lands and far flung wars and his are only selfish and small.</p>
            </blockquote>





	playing revisionist historian

**Author's Note:**

> It will do you no harm to find yourself ridiculous.  
> Resign yourself to be the fool you are.  
> (THE COCKTAIL PARTY, t.s. eliot)

When he gets back to work the next day, car pulling up into the driveway, he senses the same knot of dread tying up in his chest that he’d experienced on his first day there. It is a bit like taking a tumble back in time, hollow lungs pumping as he takes the elevator up to their floor, face fighting muscles to stay calm, composed.

There is nothing different between this and any other day (we will leave aside for the purposes of discretion, a series of nights spent sleeping on an office sofa with a mouth full of drink and a coat wrapped over his shoulders). His wife woke him a bit later than usual, perhaps; you looked so tired, dear, she had explained, pressing a soft, warm hand to his cheek as she passed the tea and toast across the table. He took the same route to work that he has every other day, the car stuttering to a stop in front of the BBC offices and rolling into the parking lot, only three minutes later than it is used to. There is nothing in this catalogue of events to explain the return of his - well, he doesn't know what to call it really.

He tightens his tie in front of a window by his office and frowns for a glimpse of his face.

“Doing alright, darling?” Lix asks, pressing a hand to his elbow as she goes past. There is something half sympathetic, half mocking about it.

“Yes, yes,” he says, straightening out the tangles from his tongue as he talks. His voice feels oddly hoarse and unused. “Of course.”

Lix only raises her eyebrows and says, there is whiskey in her office if he needs it.

 

 

The time travel doesn’t end with the nervousness, of course; the office feels different, the ranks closing in somehow and he is on the outside of it again, as he always before (there was never really a change in that, he thinks, only that it was easier - oh, it was all easier when she was around)

He had thought for a moment - somewhere between the start of things with Bel and the loss of anxiety as he sat down before the camera, that he could carve out a place to belong here, half ambition, half - something else. These people worked like they were part of something, some secret society of principles and journalistic integrity and wicked wit and jokes about communism and it was all something he was firmly on the outside of.

He was good at his job - he got good at his job and well, that hadn't happened before. And maybe he had thought that was enough.

Maybe, before, that had been enough.

 

 

These are things he has learned from working in a newsroom; there is no single certain way for events to play out. When Freddie Lyon writes a story, you have to have a back up, you script another interview or sketch to fill the time if the world doesn't fall into the written traps you lay out for it.

There is no one way. There are so many different ways a story can turn out.

So; he never told Bel he loved her that morning in her office, with her pale, stricken face staring up at him and he went back to sleeping on the office floors and when she left, she didn't say goodbye and Hector went home to Marnie.

OR

He didn't spend three nights sleeping in his office; he spent seven, a whole week and the Elms story never went on air and the sketch with the racehorses and the metaphors never went on air and The Hour stayed within the tightly drawn lines that the government had kept for it, it didn’t burrow through loopholes or poke rebellions and Bel was furious, storming about in her red suit, raging at her lost integrity and Mr. Freddie Lyon quit his job and at the end of the seven days, Hector told Bel that he loved her, not in her office but in her bed and this time she did not flinch.

He called up his family lawyer, Mr. Cripps, he's known him since he was a boy - he's a real gossip, that man with his tiny, horn-rimmed glasses and handlebar mustache and he drew up papers, divorce papers and Marnie cried but she wasn't really sorry to see him go; "there's only so much humiliation a girl can take" after all. He was never an exceptional husband and she can find better, he hopes she will.

Before the ink is dry, his things are transplanted to Bel’s apartment in Clapham. Mr. Clarence doesn't like it but there's less scandal in free love than there in adultery so he swallows it and swallows too the moment in which Hector thinks he's lost both their jobs (after all, he is only there on the grace of the man who was once his father in law and now, is only a man he once knew) but they have both of them made their bones in business, proved themselves, they are worthy, yes, even Hector. Spoiled privileged Hector, can you believe it, Mr. Lyon?

His things hang beside hers in the closet, the dark grey suits mixed up with her bright, sharp colours and her scarves muddled with his ties, all together in a pile from which he extracts one in the morning to tug around his neck.

"We should get someone in to - I don't know, clean up," he remarks, grabbing coffee off the kitchen counter.

"We, Mr. Madden?" she smirks, drawing a short, mocking breath of surprise but there is a smile there also, and she taps him on the shoulder, "Missing more comfortable lodgings?" she murmurs, bringing her mouth up near his, close but not touching and he growls, drops the coffee and newspaper behind them and growls a resoundingly final, "never" against her mouth.

They are late to the office, stumbling into the car with shirts slightly askew and suspicious dark marks in the crooks of their necks and jaws and Bel will pull her skirt just so as they leave the elevator, strutting out coolly with her hand already snatching scripts from passing hands, eyes racing over them. Lix will say hello to him in her whiskeyed drawl and drop a finger to the point on his collar with her lipstick still lingers.

He goes on air, Bel watching him from behind the spinning reels. The Hour will not sink.

OR

The story burns the reels and Bel loses her job but this time, Hector says nothing, no foolish declarations of love and nothing about running away together. He says goodbye and good luck, Miss Rowley.

He climbs downstairs and fetches his wife from the bar. He drives home.

It is not so different, perhaps, from the way things really took place, except to him, his pride.

(This is his distance from the everyone else he works with - their hypotheses are about far flung lands and further flung wars and his are only selfish and small.)

 

 

Oh, yes, Hector has learned things in the newsroom; he has learned the necessity of back up plans and the promise of brighter outcomes than those you except.

He has also learned that news once made cannot be unmade. Once you have cast it out in the public, you cannot bring it back.

Mistakes haunt you in this business, he thinks, thinks of Bel and her red mouth tight as she accepted her dismissal and Bel's tight red mouth against his own before she left in a kiss that may or may not have happened (he writes enough revisionist history these days that his mind sometimes mixes fact with fiction; always the mark of a good anchor, he imagines Mr. Lyon's maddening drawl) and of where she is now.

He thinks she is probably in her apartment, with Freddie next to her on the kitchen table, writing up a plan for the rest of her life, or another manifesto; cracking open a bottle of cheap wine at noon because that is what holidays are off and that is all this is, a holiday, a minor setback and she's Bel Rowley, she'll be up on her heels soon and off to somewhere new.

He thinks of the wallpapers in his house and of a set of patterns spread out on a table, his wife's dainty fingers pressing them down and her young little face looking up at him: "well, what do you think, Hector?" she sings.

In the end, of course, the possibilities, the alternate paths that life could have taken - those aren't really worth a damn.

 

 

"On air in twenty," Isaac calls, popping a head into his office.

The newsroom smells of coffee and stale bagels and Hector's stomach turns, he grips his desk with both hands and wills the nausea away.

"Hector, did Isaac - gods, what's wrong with you man, you look like death warmed up."

"Thank you, Lix."

She pulls up an eyebrow, moves into the chair opposite him. Lix is the kind of woman who talks with all her body, one turn of the mouth to measure disapproval or an intake of breath or flick of the wrist - he collects himself.

"You can't go out there looking like that."

He thinks she's going to retrieve a flask, possibly hidden on her person and bites the lower half of his mouth, "I can't go out there sloshed either."

"Well, get a hold of yourself, man - moping won't get her back."

His face falls for a fraction of a second, just quick enough for her to spot, oh, Lix doesn't miss a thing.

"You really are pining, then?" she whistles, half shocked but he doesn't say a thing.

Outside, the newsroom is whirring into motion, their very first episode without Miss Rowley and what do you know, they guess they can do it after all, the wheels she put in motion running and running. A show is like a machine really, any business is.

"You know, Hector," Lix says, comfortably, reaching over to pat his arm, "You really are a bastard."

He laughs over the words, "I know."

The reel starts up; he waits for the click.


End file.
